Rest of the Week

The rest of the week was packed with contract signing, ski practice, safety sessions, boot fitting, snowboard crossover (for those who don't ride snowboards) and all the kind of stuff that I had expected earlier in the week. Unfortunately this time I wasn't surprised by beer and spas. Oh well. You can't win every time.

Later that night I was surprised by... a spa. Thursday night the school had arranged for us to meet up some people who work for Nielson- a British tour operator that brings in most of our clients- at the local spa for some swimming, hot tubbing, saunas etc etc. Pretty sweet deal and it was nice to speak English for a while; my brain was starting to hurt from all the Swedish/Norwegian.

From there we headed out to "Off Piste"- our local bar/club and drank/danced it up for a while. Good times.

On Friday during lunch I was surprised with a Happy Birthday song and a big marshmallow cake. A little late I know but they wanted to wait until more people showed up. Pretty sure I heard 'better late than never' quite a few times that day. (My actual birthday was nice, but as everyone else was still to arrive there ended up being 4 of us who went out. Fun!)

This weekend we had a serious professional come in to coach us all. Johan Malmsten is from Sweden (a big plus because I could actually understand him) and has been working for Adventureski here in Norway for over 10 years. In a word; He's good. He started us with basics, as a means to help us teach in future, and then worked us up to short turns and carving techniques. I was amazed with my progress and I will forever more be a massive advocate of coaching/lessons. Over the course of the weekend I went from staggering half-assed down a red slope to riding on one ski, flying down reds, 180's, backward skiing, carving turns, trick turns... you name it. I even raced a guy I work with down to the cafe and actually beat him! Admittedly I had a serious size/weight advantage over the little Peruvian: but still!

Like my new office?